The Lusiads (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1997

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2001

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Camões, Luís de, 1524?–1580.

  [Lusíadas. English]

  The Lusíads / Luís Vas de Camões ; translated with an introduction

  and notes by Landeg White

  (Oxford world’s classics)

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  I. White, Landeg. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ9199.A2W5 1997 869.1′2–dc21 97–19376

  ISBN-13: 978–0–19–280151–7

  ISBN–10: 0–19–280151–1

  6

  Typeset by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES

  The Lusíads

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  LANDEG WHITE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE LUSÍADS

  LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES was born in 1524/5, probably in Lisbon, and educated probably at Portugal’s national university at Coimbra. By the mid-1540s he was back in Lisbon, frequenting the fringe of the court and writing his earliest love lyrics. Banished, perhaps because of amorous intrigue, he enlisted in 1547 as a common soldier in the garrison at Ceuta in Morocco and lost his left eye in battle. In 1553, after being jailed for brawling in Lisbon during the Corpus Christi procession, he sailed for India, seeing action in the Red Sea and off the Indian and Arabian coasts, and spending seventeen years in all in Goa, Macau, and Mozambique. During these years he published a dedicatory poem to a book about medicinal plants, and wrote a vast body of lyrical poetry. Much of The Lusíads was evidently completed by the time of his shipwreck in 1559 off Cambodia. In 1570 he returned to Lisbon where his epic of the Portuguese nation was published in 1572. He died in poverty in 1580, oppressed by the national disaster of Alcácer-Kebir in Morocco, and aware that Portugal was fated to pass under the rule of Spain.

  LANDEG WHITE worked for sixteen years in the West Indies and Africa. His books include studies of V. S. Naipaul, of Malawian and Mozambican history, and of southern African praise poetry, together with three collections of his own poetry. He teaches at the Universidade Aberta in Portugal.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology of Camões

  Maps

  THE LUSÍADS

  Canto One

  Canto Two

  Canto Three

  Canto Four

  Canto Five

  Canto Six

  Canto Seven

  Canto Eight

  Canto Nine

  Canto Ten

  Explanatory Notes

  For Maria Alice as before

  INTRODUCTION

  In the register of Lisbon’s India House for 1550 occurs the following entry: ‘Luís de Camões, son of Simão Vaz de Camões and Ana de Sá residents of Lisbon, in Mouraria, squire, aged 25 years. Accepted on the guarantee of his father, travelling by the man-of-war S. Pedro dos Burgalese.’ Three years later in 1553, there is a further entry, describing one Fernando Casado, another squire resident in Lisbon, and continuing: ‘in his place was Luís de Camões, son of Simão Vaz de Camões and Ana de Sá, squire, receiving 2$400 reis like the others.’

  Why Luís Vaz de Camões failed to sail in 1550 on the S. Pedro dos Burgalese, no one knows. But we do know why he sailed for India in 1553. The previous June, during one of Lisbon’s biggest religious festivals, the Corpus Christi procession, he had fought a duel with one Gonçalo Borges, keeper of the King’s harness, and wounded him with a sword thrust. He was jailed in the Tronco prison, and released on payment of a fine of 4,000 reis and an undertaking to proceed to India as a common soldier.

  Had Camões never written a line of poetry, these three obscure references would probably comprise all we knew of his existence. They tell us, far from conclusively, that he was born in 1524 or 1525, of parents living in the Mouraria district of Lisbon, that his father’s name carried weight with the India House, that his status was that of escudeiro, literally ‘shield-bearer’ or squire, belonging to the lower orders of the nobility, and that he had a capacity, amply confirmed by legend, for getting himself into deep trouble. Most important of all, they confirm his departure for India, for it was in India that he became a great poet, the first European artist to cross the equator and experience Africa and India at first hand. The result is The Lusíads, an epic of European thought and action in the sixteenth century.

  The ‘India’ to which Camões sailed was far more than a territory. It was the heart of a trading system of which the Portuguese had seized control with astonishing speed. In 1509 Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy, destroyed a combined Egyptian-Gujarati fleet off Diu, the only force capable of withstanding Portuguese warships. This was
followed by the capture of Goa (1510), Malacca (1511), and Ormuz (1515), together with most of the city states of the East African coast. Within just seventeen years of Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage, the Portuguese held and dominated all the most important sea routes and trading networks of the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the South China seas. It was a ruthless demonstration of naval might, and the first instance of a new concept of empire built on control of the oceans.

  Yet, by the time Camões arrived in Goa, on the only one of four ships to survive that year’s outward voyage, it was all beginning to unravel. Though cities continued to be added to the empire (including Macau in 1554), the great days were over. The Portuguese crown had not the resources to maintain an overseas fleet, nor Portugal the manpower for colonial administration. Trade required not just military control but the goods and bullion to keep silks and spices flowing westwards, and the hope that the empire could finance itself with the profits of the gold mines of south-east Africa proved illusory. In Camões’s single letter home from Goa, which he labels ‘the mother of villains and stepmother of honest men’, there is already a strong whiff of what was later to be recognizable as the odour of an empire in decline. French and English warships were already marauding and the Dutch were about to join the scene. The point is important, for underlying the manifest heroics of The Lusíads there is a note of elegy, of absences and regret. It had all happened before Camões’s time.

  Six years after The Lusíads was published, with its closing appeal for the imperial adventure to be rekindled, came the disaster of Alcácer-Kebir when the mad King Sebastião’s mammoth invasion of Morocco ended in his death and the destruction or enslavement of all but one hundred of his army of over 20,000. In despair, Camões wrote to a friend, ‘All will see that so dear to me was my country I was content to die not only in it but with it’. He died on 10 June 1580, just before the throne passed to Philip II of Spain. According to one early biographer, he was buried in a borrowed shroud. Three hundred years later, what were assumed to be his remains were re-buried in the great monastery of the Jerónimos at Belém.

  The European maritime empires which changed the world for ever have had their day, but ‘discoveries’ is not a word we need balk at. The confirmation by late-fifteenth-century Europeans that the world was much larger than the Mediterranean basin with parts of the east attached, was matched a century later by proof that the earth was not the centre of the universe but a wandering planet in a universe that was not unique. Both discoveries posed a challenge to existing beliefs from which the world, in and beyond Europe, is still recovering.

  Camões completed The Lusíads and died without knowing of the Polish astronomer Copernicus and his theories. In canto 10, it is the Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres which Tethys explains to da Gama. But the new geographical discoveries of the previous century, and the unprecedented encounters between peoples they entailed, are at the very heart of his epic. In cantos 3 to 5, da Gama explains to the Sultan of Malindi exactly where Europe is, country by country, and how Portugal came to sponsor his present voyage. The explanation involves more than geography. From Christ’s manifestation at the Battle of Ourique to da Gama sitting on the beach at St Helen’s Bay, north of Cape Town, using the astrolabe to determine his position, we are swept as in no other Renaissance poem from the world of religion to the world of science.

  But then it is the Sultan of Malindi who gives da Gama a pilot to navigate the last stretch across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. When the fleet arrives, it is Monsayeed, a Muslim from Morocco, who tells da Gama about the history, religion, and social and political systems of India, before proceeding in canto 7 to tell the Hindu Samorin of Malabar everything he knows about the Portuguese, information supplemented in canto 8 as Paulo da Gama gives a lesson in Portuguese history to one of the Samorin’s officials. There are other mini-encounters, some friendly, some violent—what other epic contains so many different nationalities? The poem concludes in canto 10 with a guided tour of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Japan, various Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, and finally the Americas and Antarctica (with a reference to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe), as Tethys explains to the Portuguese the momentous consequences of their voyage to India in demonstrating to mankind the dimensions and wealth of the planet mankind inhabits. Nothing quite like this happened again until December 1968, when the Apollo 8 spacecraft showed us the first pictures of Earth taken from space.

  Over three centuries of colonial rule have blunted our responses to that pristine vision. As European power in India and Africa hardened into paternalism and a degree of contempt for their peoples and cultures, the English and Portuguese languages took on a carapace which obscured the dangerous excitement of those original encounters. In Portugal, long before it was appropriated by Salazar’s estado novo as national propaganda, The Lusíads was employed to bolster a bruised national pride. Even today, in post-revolution Portugal, the quincentenary of the descobrimentos does not envisage that there is much to be ‘discovered’ by Portugal, only by other nations learning of her past greatness. Meanwhile, it is instructive to contrast English translations of The Lusíads over a similar period. The first, Richard Fanshawe’s version of 1655, still makes a splendid read. Though its language has dated, it retains a sweetness and a bustling, grotesque energy which conveys better than any version since that this voyage was an intellectual as well as physical adventure. He takes some liberties, usually in pursuit of rhymes, but in one respect his version is truer than any subsequent translation: the people the Portuguese encounter in Africa and India are, as in the original, consistently called ‘people’ (gente). By contrast, William Atkinson’s prose version of 1952 has the virtues of complete clarity and much greater accuracy. Yet, in a curious manner, the imaginative power of The Lusíads seems to embarrass him. His introduction comments curiously on the ‘pedantry’ of Camões’s classical references, on his ‘abuse of epithet and adverb’, and on ‘the ever-recurring problem, in a historical-geographical narrative, of versifying the essentially prosaic’. It has to be said that Atkinson’s rendering of the African and Indian dimensions of The Lusíads is little more than a tissue of colonial-settler platitudes.

  At issue here is not intelligence or scholarship but over-familiarity, so that Camões’s most recent English editor can suggest in all seriousness that he need never have left Portugal to find the materials for his epic.1 Camões has not been fortunate in finding editors and translators who have themselves crossed the equator. Yet the constant weaving of his historical sources with the demands of the epic form and with personal thought and fresh observation are the very substance of The Lusíads.

  Consider, for instance, a very minor episode, stanzas 62–4 of canto 5, when the navigators put ashore at São Braz, near Mossel Bay on the South African coast. This is their second encounter with a group of Africans, and it is, incidentally, fascinating to compare how different translators address the task of describing their hosts: for Fanshawe they are ‘The people that this country did possess’; for the eighteenth-century William Mickle, celebrating British commercial power, they are ‘the tenants of the coast’; Atkinson calls them ‘the natives here’; while for the South African poet Guy Butler they are ‘the nation’, as though da Gama was welcomed on the beach by a delegation from the ANC.

  Camões includes the episode partly because it features in the historical record which he follows with great respect. His sources are not entirely consistent, one speaking of ‘some treachery’ and ‘two bombards’ being fired, another of ‘gentleness’ with dancing and feasting. He selects the details which suit his purpose: that the people were similar to those previously encountered at St Helen’s Bay, that they traded sheep but not their cattle, which they valued too highly to barter, that their women rode on large oxen, and that among them were some skilled in playing a kind of flute. Poetically the episode forms a pastoral counterpoint to the terrifying grandeur of the encounter with Adamastor at the Ca
pe of Good Hope, an instance of Camões’s mastery in varying the subject-matter and tone. But his additions are significant. Twice he emphasizes the humanity written in ‘their smiling faces’. Where the source speaks of them ‘conversing with our people by signs’, Camões shows the frustration of being unable to communicate, and of having to separate without exchanging words. Where the source talks of ‘playing and dancing’ and ‘a kind of pastoral flute’, Camões knows that these songs have words sung ‘sweetly and in harmony’, and he adds the intriguing comment, ‘whether rhymed or in prose we could not gauge’. It is Camões the poet, interested in other people’s poetry, who notes a problem which still preoccupies students of African oral performance, namely, that the borderline between poetry and prose is unfixed and uncertain.

  The Lusíads is packed with such moments when personal experience and alert enquiry combine with an imaginative reinterpretation of his sources to cast a patina of freshness over the text.

  Above all else, however, The Lusíads is an epic. History supplies its heroes (the Portuguese) and its subject-matter (da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497–8). The poet’s experience of the same voyage over half-a-century later supplies a thousand intimate touches. But Camões’s main concern is to dramatize the significance of that original voyage as an event transcending history, redefining the course of human affairs in the divine plan.

  The opening line (‘Arms are my theme, and those matchless heroes’) deliberately modifies the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid (‘Arma virumque cano’), and throughout The Lusíads Camões makes reference to the episodes, the machinery, and the shaping of Virgil’s epic. He begins in medias res with the Portuguese already in the Mozambique Channel (appropriately, for this was the part of the voyage where no one had preceded them). This allows for a long internal narrative as da Gama, imitating Aeneas’ account of the Trojan War to Queen Dido of Carthage, gives the Sultan of Malindi a long lesson in Portuguese history. The retrospective is balanced by the glimpse of heroes yet to be born and the vision of a glorious future, granted to Aeneas by his father Anchises in the underworld, and to da Gama by Tethys in canto 10. Finally, passing over many more minor episodes and verbal echoes, there is the machinery of the gods and goddesses, of which more in a moment.